The present invention was developed because of the need for a dispensing package for brushed dental floss, such as those disclosed in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,837,351 issued Sep. 24, 1974 and 4,142,538 issued Mar. 6, 1979. While this type of dental floss has revolutionized the dental floss industry, it has brought with it a packaging and dispensing problem.
The older regular dental floss that comes in a small hard plastic container with a long continuous length strand of 100 to 200 mm and a small cutting edge at the exit window which allows the user to cut a desired length presents no tangling problem. However, with the new brushed dental floss, which is packaged in individual strands consisting of a threader on one end and a flexible floss on the other end with the brushed section in between there exists a problem.
This problem involves the removal of a single strand for use and not pulling out a half dozen or so strands that are co-mingled with the one strand that is desired.
This state-of-the-art dental floss has been on the market for about ten years as has the problem of numerous entangled strands of floss being pulled from a package when a user wishes to extract a single therefrom. The present invention overcomes the inherent dispensing problem of brushed dental floss because it allows the removal of a single strand of brushed dental floss in a one-at-a-time fashion and does not cause the entanglement of the floss remaining in the dispensing package. All of this allows the floss to be pulled out by the brush section which is positioned in the window and not floss section.